JJ Food Service Ltd. is one of the leading omnichannel bulk food retailers in the UK. Managing Director Mushtaque Ahmed talks about their success with RELEX and how unifying promotion planning and price optimization is helping them streamline processes, save time, and increase accuracy in both functions.
Transcript
My name is Mushtaque Ahmed. I’m the Managing Director of JJ Foodservice Ltd. The business is 35 years old, and we are based in Enfield as headquarters, but we operate from 11 other branches outside London. JD Foodservice is a business who caters for the caterers. We have got 3,000 different items we cater for, and that includes food and non-food items as well.
JJ Foodservice operates in a business where it’s highly competitive. There are hundreds of operators nationwide. And as a result, we need a lot of technology to optimize these processes. And when it comes to supply chain, we heavily rely on RELEX. And it’s not only price optimization, it’s also how we replenish our warehouses. RELEX technology takes care of that so that our product level in every branch is at the optimal point.
So, with tools like promotion optimization, with tools like price optimization, again, we take full advantage of automating these processes. So that, as manpower, we invest less in those processes, but we rely on the technology to take advantage and reduce the time it takes and improve the accuracy.
Anybody who is operating in this industry or, for that matter, any other industry where they are buying and selling products, a price optimization tool is absolutely paramount and the reason behind that if there is enough volume of products, if there’s enough movement of goods, it is extremely difficult to manage it with just pure manpower. Because human being has got limitation in their ability to process information. Whereas with a tool like RELEX price optimization tool, you really pass it to the technology. And the capability of the of the machines are far, far better and superior than what a human being can process.
A technology partner is not a technology partner. It is almost an integral part of a business. That’s how, at JJ Foodservice, we look at companies like RELEX. So, it is a partnership for a long time. And the journey we have had – for over the last ten years – with RELEX has been a very winning one because the tool has never broken down.
The tool has given us what we wanted and exceeded expectations on many occasions. And the most important thing, RELEX is a company who invest heavily on their research and development. Which means that we are not buying a product which is standing still, and we are having occasional version upgrades. We are having new models coming out every now and then, which then expands the capability of the original tool to do ten years ago, and is doing a lot more ten years later. And we hope that this journey is going to continue for ten years ahead.
